Re: RES: Class part 3

[MARIPOWER716@xxxxxxx]

>Is there any book in which these questions are discussed in full length?
Renato Pompeu<


The book that sums up this question of class is "The Future Is Up To Us: A
Revolutionary Talking Politics With The American people by Nelson Peery."

www.lrna.org/speakers. Telephone: 1-800-691-6888.


Mr. Peery is singularly responsible for what is essentially a new doctrine of
the class struggle. Mr. Peery was a member of the Communist Party USA about
40 years ago and after a bitter split was part of the Provisional Organizing
Committee (POC). In the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the 1967
Detroit Rebellion he began recruiting activists on the West Coast on the
basis of a radically different approach to what was then called The Negro
National Colonial Question and what would be called a Stalinist approach to
the doctrine of Lenin.

He formed the California Communist League and began publishing their paper,
the People's Tribune. I personally became aware of the People's Tribune
perhaps in 1970 and was deeply impressed by the lead article: Juneteenth Day
- Take Negro Nation Day to the People. The California Communist League
published a theoretical journal called "Proletariat," with articles in it
unlike any of the movement literature I had ever read.

At the time I was a member of the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers
and my assignment was the publication of leaflets and pamphlets used for
study and to answer all the mail. I was perhaps 17 or 18 years old. When the
League of Revolutionary Black workers split, the workers and student sections
merged with the California Communist League and became the Communist League
and perhaps a couple years later merged with the Motor City Labor League in
Detroit and became the Communist Labor Party as a historical honoring of John
Reed.

To my understanding, never in the history of our country has a large core of
black industrial workers, a hand full of Anglo-American industrial workers
and a large core of intellectuals - primarily white, engaged in the
systematic study of the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on the
scale that took place in Detroit.

It would be Mr. Peery's approach to the doctrine of Lenin that would and have
shaped my particular brand of Marxism for a lifetime. The core of us in
Detroit and those gathered around Mr. Perry in Chicago understood that
something different was taking place in the evolution of capitalism and the
industrial system. Being in Detroit made this very easy to intuitively grasp
because the auto industry was the classical home to technological innovation
as application. The downturn of 1980 was horrible and laid waste to our
organization in Detroit by scattering folks across the country in search of
work.

Anyway, I believe it was Mr. Peery that made the theoretical break through
that consolidated the conception of the emergence of a communist class. I
originally opposed this conception, following a different line of reasoning
concerning Marx approach to the theory of value. In retrospect I believe the
impact of 25 years of trade union work distorted by point of view, and I
simply had not left the boundary of a certain syndicalism that inflicts any
communist engaging trade union work for a lifetime. What was always obvious
is that the "workers" - the famed industrial proletariat, could not overthrow
the system of production it engaged. It is not possible to leave a
historically evolved social formation because it is not nice.

My family were not sharecroppers and at this writing we are three generations
industrial workers. The sharecropper was liberated as a class by changes in
the material power of production that eliminated them as a distinct class.
The liberation of a class is not a political act but means being kicked of
out a social position due to technology development or an enhanced energy
source. We instinctively understood this in Detroit and use to joking laugh
and write in our literature that, "We went from picking cotton to picking
steel."

We also coined the term, "niggermation" in our ancient literature to describe
the process we were experiencing that ran behind automation and job
elimination, but had no way to grasp the internal driving force as a concrete
boundary in industrial development. "From the field to the factory to the
Street."

Something different was taking place that did not originate in the mode of
capital accumulation but was driven by accumulation.

It was around April 2000, after the riots in Cincinnati, that my point of
view shifted radically. Much of this was due to studying Mr. Peery's articles
in the People's Tribune and the paper "Rally." Retiring from the auto
industry in October 2001, I made a commitment to reread and restudy Marx's
Capital and Theory of Surplus Value and everything Marx and Engels wrote on
dialectics, along with the official documents on Marxist Philosophy
authorized by the Soviet government.

My early writings to Marxline under the name Joe Freemen were rather crude
and got me kicked off of Marxline, (Lou was right) but articulated a
radically different approach to the so-called, "transformation problem," what
at that time was called "the labor theory of value," and how the organic
composition of capital operated in the flesh.

This is stated because there is very little material available on this
specific approach, outside the People's Tribune and various reports of the
League of Revolutionaries for a New America.

The three part piece on class and the "after burn" article was meant to be
the opening gun in articulating an indigenousness expression of Marxism
totally American. The style of presentation that mimics Mr. Perry's has taken
me twenty years to more than less perfect. I have written a couple articles
on the A-list and Pen-L that I believe advance the conception of antagonism
as a form of development. This new conception of antagonism allowed me to
grasp the revolutionary logic of class development and polarity and why no
social system can be overthrown by the basic class components of the system.

Here is an example: perhaps a year or so ago there was a significant
discussion called "rethinking the transition from feudalism to capitalism,"
that I followed on Marxline. To proceed from a theory construct called "the
transition from feudalism to capitalism," is to be prevented from unraveling
the logic of social revolution because feudalism is a political term as is
capitalism. The transition was from agricultural relationships and wealth in
the form of landed property to machine society or industrial society, with a
new corresponding mode of wealth accumulation. To simply call modern society
capitalist is to elevate the mode of accumulation as the primary distinguish
feature of society when Marx and Engels described industrial development or
the industrial production of commodities.

It is true that this new approach to class is different than that of Marx but
Marx wrote 150 years ago during the transition from agriculture to
manufacture and industry and classes were observed as these primary social
groups engaging the productivity infrastructure. That is to say his writings
observed a specific quantitative boundary of this qualitative reconfiguration
of the system we call industrial production. The concept "quantitative
boundary of this qualitative reconfiguration of the system we call industrial
production," is a new concept of industrial society in the arsenal of
Marxism. This new theory approach was used to reread Rosa Luxemburg's
Accumulation of Capital or rather large portions of it, which was not to
interesting to me 30 years ago as a young man.

It is painfully clear that no society can advance to the system of
distribution Marx speaks of in his Critique of the Gotha Program on the basis
of industrial production. That is, industrial society does not developed into
communist society as such. The social revolution is the technological
revolution that unravel the old relations and eventually demands that society
leap to a new poitical basis that more accurately conform to the productivity
logic of society.

What political forms will correspond to a society based on advanced robotics?

This is a different theory approach closely tied to the writings of Marx and
Engels, while the writing style - presentation, is actually running along the
lines of how Stalin wrote and is meant to allow anyone with a 6th grade
education to assimilate the theoretical grid, without every having to have
read anything written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Here is an example of the method of application of dialectics as an approach
to unraveling social development:

When something fundamental to a thing changes, then everything dependent on
this thing must in turn change. Not all at once, but change must occur. The
human eye cannot see the emergence of a new qualitative entity. The eye only
sees that, which has emerged. Therefore, the first stage of witnessing new
changes in the technology of our society is the second phase of a
qualitatively new development.

Computers, digitalized production processes and advance robotics shows that
the production process is changing from electro-mechanical based production
to electro-computerized production process. The old society organized on the
basis of electro-mechanical production process and its quantitative expansion
is halted. And so on and so forth.

Mr. Peery's book is an excellent starting point.

A communist class has arisen. What makes this group of people a communist
class, more than less marginal to the industrial system of production as it
passes to a new mode of production, is not simply the new technology applied
to the production process, but the fact that these people are being compelled
to demand the products and services available in society be distributed to
them without having the money to pay for them.

An increasing large section of our senior citizens are being bankrupted by
the need for medicine and medical services. Without money how will these
urgent medical need be met? The concept of an objectively existing communist
class is not the same as the industrial class of workers from the early 20th
century up to the 1970s.


Melvin P.